| Description |
1 online resource (x, 329 pages) : illustrations |
| Contents |
Introduction: Eden and intellectual history -- Paradise explained : an Edenic primer -- Promoting Paradise, ordering wilderness: topographical optimism meets agricultural reality -- A body unembarrassed: humoral empowerment and Edenic temperance -- Building Bensalem at Massachusetts Bay: the search for Solomon's Adamic wisdom -- Translating Paradise: Hebrew, Herbert, Milton, Fox, and the pursuit of linguistic purity -- From pilgrimage to new birth, Adam to Eve: the evolution of Edenic models for conversion -- Life, liberty, and the pursuit of Eden: the architects, slave laborers, and master masons of Freedom's Temple -- Epilogue: The Edenic inheritance |
| Summary |
'Inventing Eden' charts the ways in which colonial New England writers replaced their initial topographical optimism with an interest in recovering the somatic, intellectual, spiritual, and social perfections that Adam and Eve enjoyed in the biblical Garden. As they appropriated and adapted Old World beliefs about the primitive Eden and a coming millennial paradise to their New World surroundings over the first two centuries of European colonization in New England, Puritans and Quakers disciplined their physical and figurative bodies in an effort to reclaim a prelapsarian physiological temperance |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references (pages 253-321) and index |
| Notes |
Online resource; title from digital title page (ebrary platform, viewed September 23, 2014) |
| Subject |
American literature -- New England -- History and criticism
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American literature -- 17th century -- History and criticism
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American literature -- 18th century -- History and criticism
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Eden in literature.
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LITERARY CRITICISM -- American -- General.
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American literature
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Eden in literature
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New England
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| Genre/Form |
Criticism, interpretation, etc.
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| Form |
Electronic book
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| ISBN |
9780199998159 |
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0199998159 |
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9780199382415 |
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0199382417 |
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